Her Final Breath (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 2) (8 page)

Margarita’s birthday had not worked because her husband had either changed the combination or changed the padlock. Amid the hundreds of flies Walter Gipson had tied, he’d also tacked a half dozen naked photographs of Angela Schreiber to the corkboard. In several, Tracy recognized the worn and stained gray carpet from the Aurora Motor Inn. Walter Gipson had been a little more infatuated with Angela Schreiber than he’d led Tracy to believe. And people who lied usually had something to hide.

Gipson bowed his head and began to weep. “I think I’d like to talk to that attorney now.”

CHAPTER 12

T
racy popped a can of cat food and left it on the counter, too tired to take out a dish from the cupboard. Roger didn’t seem to mind. For herself she dumped a can of tuna on the remainder of a salad she hadn’t had time to finish at lunch and carried it with her. As she crossed through the dining room, she noticed her laptop on the table and thought again of the murder of Beth Stinson. Johnny Nolasco’s case.

Nolasco had been partners with a racist bigot named Floyd Hattie for more than a decade. When Nolasco got bumped to sergeant, Hattie was assigned Tracy as his new partner. Hattie took one look at her, said, “I ain’t working with no Dickless Tracy,” and promptly retired. Faz had told Tracy to count her blessings. Hattie and Nolasco had a perfect conviction record, something they liked to rub in the other detectives’ faces, but it was well-known that neither was above the use of questionable police tactics—unknown street sources suddenly showing up as witnesses, well-worn ruses to “encourage” confessions, and even one or two instances of suspects falling and hurting themselves.

Tracy set the salad down next to her laptop and hit the space bar. The screen popped to life, still displaying the attorney general’s website. She logged back into HITS and pulled up the Beth Stinson file. She suspected Nolasco had completed the form. She doubted Hattie, with one foot already out the door, would have bothered. She remained puzzled by the inconsistencies: the positive answer to the question about whether Stinson had been sexually assaulted, yet the lack of forensic evidence to substantiate that conclusion. She was also bothered by the similarity in the details of Stinson’s bedroom and the motel rooms where they’d found Hansen and Schreiber. She wasn’t about to talk to Nolasco about it, and she certainly wouldn’t be hunting down Hattie. She doubted he’d improved much in his retirement.

She made a mental note to call the State Archives and have Stinson’s file pulled from storage, though she’d have to tread quietly. Nolasco was vindictive, and if he got word she was looking into one of his old files, he’d flip his lid, especially if she found any of the kind of improprieties Faz had hinted at. She thought about whether to say anything to Kins. Married with three kids, he couldn’t afford a suspension, if it came to that. She decided she’d take a look at the file on her own, and if nothing came of the similarities to Hansen and Schreiber, she’d send it back. If something did, she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.

She shut down the machine and took her salad to the bedroom. As she entered the room, the floodlight in the backyard triggered and backlit the curtains drawn across the sliding glass doors. She pulled back the curtain and looked down into the yard. The rain continued to fall, but there was little wind and no sign of any furry four-legged creatures that could have triggered the motion detector.

She’d told Billy she didn’t need the patrol car, but that had been bravado talking. Any sign of weakness was too easily attributed to her gender. It was a double standard, but it was also reality. In truth, she was glad to have an officer parked at the curb.

She changed into a long T-shirt and climbed into bed, channel surfing while picking at her salad. Though physically exhausted, she continued to go over her interrogation of Walter Gipson, the two crime scenes, and about a thousand questions. She needed to slow her thoughts or she’d never fall asleep. She activated the DVR and pulled up the latest
Downton Abbey.
The curtains lit up again.

She turned off the television to kill the light in the room, slipped from bed, and eased back the curtain. The lawn remained empty, the trees still. So why did she have that sensation like at the shooting range that she was being watched? The floodlights went out. When they did not trigger again, she told herself it was probably the rain, that Dan had likely set the motion detector on too sensitive a setting. She climbed back into bed with her Glock, setting it on the pillow beside her.

Tracy Crosswhite had made some changes since his initial visit. The floodlights and motion detector were new, as was the police car parked in front of the house, likely because of the present he’d left for her at the shooting range, which he was starting to think had been a mistake.

The lights had come on unexpectedly as he approached the rear of her house, and he’d had to quickly retreat into the brush, where he crouched, with water dripping from the brim of his camouflage hat.

Ordinarily the rain didn’t bother him, but tonight it had managed to find the gaps and seams in his protective gear and he could feel his shirt sticking to his back and moisture seeping through his socks, a Pacific Northwest dampness that made his bones ache. He’d suspected that, with the murder of Angela Schreiber, Tracy would be late getting home. Her schedule fluctuated, depending on whether she was the detective on call. When there was a murder, she had no schedule. Some nights she didn’t even make it home.

So it had been a calculated risk to visit her on a night she was investigating a murder, but tonight the urge to see her had been too strong for him to ignore and looking at photographs he’d taken of her simply didn’t satisfy him. The need to be close to her, to feel her presence, to feel that connection he’d first felt when he’d seen her on the news at the Nicole Hansen crime scene was overwhelming. Though it had only been through the television, that first moment had been unlike anything he’d ever experienced. Love at first sight. What wasn’t to love? Tracy was tall and blonde and beautiful. He had started waiting outside her apartment and following her, keeping a safe distance. Once, he’d even sat not far from her in a coffee shop, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak to her. Still, as he’d gotten to know her better, he’d realized the attraction was more than physical. It was spiritual. He wondered if—no, he knew—she was his soul mate, that person he was destined to spend the rest of his life with.

When she’d left for Cedar Grove, he’d felt a gaping hole in his being, like he was missing half of himself. He couldn’t feel whole without her. He had to be near her. Not for the whole time—he couldn’t do that with work and a family—but he’d managed to get away for a few days. He’d even sat in court one day for the hearing of Edmund House. He snapped photographs of her. His favorite was the one he took while she was standing on the porch outside the veterinary hospital in Pine Flat. He’d managed to get a close-up of her face. It was an incredible shot, breathtaking. The cold had turned her cheeks ruddy, giving her an almost girlish appearance. Snowflakes encircled her like a halo, and her eyes, a dazzling blue, appeared to be looking directly at him. The power of her gaze was so strong he’d lowered the camera to stare back at her. She had that kind of power. Then he’d realized she was staring not at him but at his car. He’d cleared the windshield of snow to take the pictures, making the car stand out among all the others.

Luckily she’d gone inside the clinic, giving him a chance to leave.

He looked up at the back of the house when the kitchen light illuminated. She’d come home. His gamble had paid off. He quickly raised his binoculars, focusing them on the window to the far left and saw the refrigerator door open. He caught a glimpse of her when she shut it and another when she passed the window. Then the window went dark. He redirected the binoculars to the sliding glass door on the far right, her bedroom. When the light did not immediately come on, he panned left, to the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. Tracy always kept the blinds open, no doubt to enjoy the view, but it was too dark for him to see inside and the chances she would step onto the patio were not good, given the late hour and rain.

He could just make out a faint bluish glow. Her laptop. She often worked at the dining room table, sometimes for hours. On those nights he was content just to sit and be in her presence. But tonight he craved more. He craved her.

When five minutes passed and his joints began to ache, he told himself he could wait another five. Five minutes became twenty. The blue light extinguished. His pulse quickened. He shifted the binoculars to her bedroom. The light snapped on. The drapes were drawn.

He swore, profoundly disappointed that he wouldn’t see her, not a glimpse.

The light went out. Blue-gray shadows danced across the curtains. She was watching television in bed. Reluctantly, he gathered his belongings, about to leave when an idea struck him. It was a risk, like leaving the noose. The jury was still out on whether that was a good idea or not. It was all about the potential payoff.

He stepped from the brush before he changed his mind. His boots squished and formed small puddles in the saturated lawn. When the light did not come on, he raised his arms and waved them over his head. Nothing. He took another step and repeated the motion.

The floodlights lit up the yard.

He retreated quickly into the brush and raised the binoculars, feeling the rush of anticipation.

And then she was there, standing at the glass door, like an apparition but so very real. She wore a long white T-shirt that stopped midthigh. He’d never seen her legs before, never seen her in a dress, always in blue jeans or slacks. Her legs were as he’d imagined them, long and lean, and toned. He inched forward, as if pulled by that magnetic attraction, and had to fight the urge to walk to her. He couldn’t do that. Not yet. She didn’t know him yet. She’d think he was a nut job. She had to see him in a different setting, a setting in which he could show her how much he loved her. Until then, he needed to be patient. Until then, images like this would have to be enough.

CHAPTER 13

E
arly the following morning, Tracy and Kins sat with Rick Cerrabone in a conference room at the King County Courthouse, drinking black coffee and going over the forensics from the room at the Aurora Motor Inn. Tracy felt dull from a lack of sleep. The floodlights had gone on twice more in the night. She’d ignored them. Now a dull headache throbbed at her temples and across the top of her head, and the ibuprofen she’d taken to dull the pain was upsetting her empty stomach. From Kins’s haggard appearance, she deduced he wasn’t feeling much better.

“Maybe he was careless,” Kins said. He sat hunched over a paper cup. They were discussing how Walter Gipson’s fingerprints could be at the motel but not his DNA. “He couldn’t very well show up wearing gloves, right? So he puts them on in the bathroom and then he wipes down surfaces after he kills her, but this time he’s careless.”

“I don’t see a guy that careful leaving a fingerprint,” Tracy said.

“He burned the bottoms of her feet. If he did it to speed up the process, maybe he was in a hurry and got careless.”

“Or maybe he just wanted to see her suffer more,” Tracy said.

Cerrabone had removed his suit jacket, draping it carefully over an adjacent chair. There wasn’t a wrinkle to be found in his heavily starched white shirt, and his red tie screamed government authority. He was starting a trial that morning. “What
do
we know for sure?” he said.

They had less than forty-eight hours before the law accorded Walter Gipson a probable cause hearing, at which Cerrabone would have to convince a judge there was sufficient evidence to hold Gipson for the murder of Angela Schreiber.

“Dancers at the Pink Palace confirmed he’s been hanging around,” Kins said, reading from one of the witness statements Faz and Del had obtained. “Schreiber apparently brought him into the dressing room one time.”

“He’s not denying that,” Tracy said.

“And the video of the Pink Palace parking lot shows Schreiber leaving with him at just after one in the morning,” Kins said.

“Which he also admitted,” Tracy said.

Kins flipped through the pages of their report. “Cell phone records indicate frequent calls to Schreiber during the last two months—”

“Which he isn’t denying.”

“Cell tower hits for his phone match the hits on Schreiber’s phone for that evening.”

“But also confirm a hit on a tower on the east side of Lake Washington right about the time Gipson said he returned home.”

Kins lowered the report. “I hate it when you do that.”

Tracy shrugged. “Better me than a defense attorney.”

“What about the Dancing Bare?” Cerrabone asked.

“Faz and Del ran his photo over there. Nobody’s seen him,” Tracy said.

“What else?” Cerrabone said.